


Small Opening

by HarveyWallbanger



Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: Arkham Asylum, Canon-Typical Violence, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Suicide mention, incarceration, psychiatric hospital
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-26
Updated: 2017-11-26
Packaged: 2019-02-07 09:41:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,444
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12838500
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HarveyWallbanger/pseuds/HarveyWallbanger
Summary: Copulation Round.





	1. Squib

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MillicentCordelia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MillicentCordelia/gifts).



> This story takes place after the events of my story, "Marat/Sade".  
> The quote in the summary is the name of a musical number in the play, later movie, Marat/Sade. If you think it's a famous quote, it's probably a famous quote. The last lines are lifted whole from Oscar Wilde's Salome. So, don't go thinking that I ever did anything original.  
> The violent content is not, in my estimation, especially violent, but given the tone of the story, I stuck the warning on it, anyway. Please use your discretion, Dear Readers.  
> I am not involved in the production of Gotham, and this school is not involved in the production of Gotham. No one pays me to do this. Do not try any of this at home. Thank you, and good night.

Somebody-or-other once said that there are no second acts in American life. You beg to differ. There is always a second act. The question is, though, does anybody see it? Is it still a play, if no one is watching? Jack Smith used to act for one or two people, for nobody, for the sake of acting. To do that, though, there has to be something inside you that needs to come out. You need to be full, and once, yes, you were full, but now, you are empty. Pigs begin to appear in your dreams, when curiously, they never did before. They’re empty, too, hanging in slaughterhouses and butcher shop windows, waxy skin and the grainy pale red of dead flesh. Rib cages sawn open, showing only strangely clean compartments of darkness. You could slip inside of one. The animal’s wound would close like cabinet doors over your face. All of life is closing around you. You take a deep breath. Yes- you’re ready, now. Curtains.  
Yet--  
Do your eyes deceive you?  
No, they do not.  
Shyly, you smile. “I thought you were finished with me.”  
You’ve been brought again to the room with the two chairs. It’s like a set, you think fancifully, and truly, you can’t even imagine that this place exists when you and Jim aren’t here to act something out. This room belongs to you. Oh, yes- it must. You’ve bled here. You came in Jim’s hand, against the wall.  
No preamble. “Why pigs?”  
“Well, as I explained to you, Jim, it was a play on the name Pygmalion. You are familiar with the original myth, are you not? The sculptor enamored of his inanimate creation? What is it about Gotham that so inspires love and devotion? The luminaries of the art world celebrate her. Heroes and villains wage bloody war for her. Ordinary citizens live and die for her. You’ve given her everything, done unspeakable things for her, yet, for you, she remains cold, unyielding. I imagined breathing life into her, making her pulse with life. Well, pulse with blood, anyway.”  
He looks at you, unmoved.  
“As for the porcine imagery, well, the masked man helped me with that. He said that I should disguise myself, become a figure larger than life. It was he who suggested pigs. His family had interests in agriculture and slaughterhouses, he said.”  
“Which farms, which slaughterhouses?”  
“He was always careful to speak in general terms,” you shrug apologetically, “You know, I think that he didn’t trust me to keep his secrets. But what about yours, Jim? Why are you really here?”  
“I need to know.”  
“Need to know what? You seem to think that you already know everything worth knowing.”  
“I need proof.”  
“But surely, you have the lady dead to rights. Or are you going to let a little thing like the law get in the way of you doing what you must?”  
His features positively twisting, Jim frowns. “That’s not how we do things.”  
“All right, Jim,” you say gently.  
“I need evidence. I need a way there.”  
“When last we spoke, you seemed convinced that I had had help from someone in the police department.”  
“Yes,” Jim says, almost breathlessly, turning on like a light, his voice softer, his face more open.  
“If you still believe this, I would suggest investigating your own people.”  
“Who?”  
“Do you really think that one hand was meant to know what the other was doing?”  
“You told me that you were free to kill police officers indiscriminately. What if you killed your ally by mistake?”  
“Then another would take his or her place. I remind you, Jim: none of this matters. No one mattered. As in every other part of life, certain parties were insulated, because of their importance to a greater plan, but everyone else was disposable.”  
“Even you,” Jim sneers.  
You laugh, and satisfyingly, he starts. “Especially me! Oh, Jim. When will you accept that?”  
“It’s not true. It’s not the way we do things,” he says again, as though willing himself to believe it, or praying it into fact.  
“Oh, Jim,” you say it softly, this time, and place your hand on his knee. He folds his arms over his chest, but doesn’t tell you not to touch him.  
“How did they die?” he asks, and you’re electrified, transfixed. You don’t have to ask him whom he means.  
“I don’t think you need to know that to solve your little mystery.”  
“No, but I want to know.”  
“No, you don’t,” you say, and pull back your hand.  
“Yes,” he says, horrifyingly earnest, “I do.”  
“My sister,” you snap. Something passes over him, and it thrills you to watch him struggle with it, whatever it may be. It feeds you. It makes you feel full, when before, you were empty. “My sister was cut down by a villain aided and abetted by your... incorruptible police department.” Your voice oozes. It drips. It is the very sound of corruption. “Once I learned the truth, I couldn’t go on as I had. Everything was a lie. My grief, my life was a lie. None of it had to happen.”  
“I’m sorry,” he says, his voice too low and ugly for him to be lying to you. You want to slap him. Instead, you kiss him. This is better. Had you hit him, he would only have hit you, harder, in return. Like this, he must give the comfort you snatch from him. He must permit you to suck the breath from his body, making you full, and him, empty. When he doesn’t push you away, you continue. You hold his face in your hands, you suck his tongue. You taste him, you absorb him, and you’re breathing heavily, as though you’d just begun to breathe, having never breathed before. His hands are on your hands, his mouth opens against yours, again and again. Dragging in a long breath, you drop your head, rest your forehead against his shoulder. Your body heaves like a dying animal. His hand is on your back.  
As you kneel, you don’t look at his face. You look only straight ahead, first at his clothed body, then at the flesh that you bare. You expose him further, waiting for him to stop you, but he does nothing, says nothing. Still, wordless, he lets you blow him. Only at the end do his reactions open around you. His hand rests on the back of your head. He moves with you. He moans. He says your name.  
Your real name.  
It shouldn’t surprise you that he knows it; it’s in your file. And, yet-  
And yet.  
And yet-


	2. Bladder

The world closes around you again, like a wound, like a mouth. You’re judged not to be security risk, so you’re permitted to engage in more social activities. In the morning, you’re escorted into the day room. At midday, you attend group therapy. In the afternoon, you see a psychiatrist one-to-one, the ever-present guard waiting outside. There’s no longer a reason to keep all of this to yourself. You quietly and calmly tell everyone about Ursula, how she lived and how she died. You worked together in the theater. You both acted, though most of what you did was behind the scenes. You wrote together, put on plays for groups of your friends. She looked so much like you. Often, you’d put on each other’s clothes, and she would pretend to be you, and you, her. Your audiences found this most amusing. When she died, you didn’t want to keep her clothing. You gave it to the theater, but immediately regretted it. What they couldn’t use whole, they repurposed, made into parts of other garments. So that you would see, not whole, but in pieces, something of hers. She was there, before you, now more dead than ever, symbolically dismembered. The first time, you ran into the bathroom, cried and vomited at once, silver threads pouring like moonlight from your face.  
After a time, you explain to the others, it became easier. It hurt you terribly, you felt such nauseating guilt, but you began to force yourself to live again. Nothing would bring her back to life, but it was she, after all, who was dead; not you. You’d been brought to the realization that you couldn’t bring yourself to commit suicide, so, as the lady said- might as well live. When numbness sealed over you, it was like glorious oblivion to an exhausted body. You knew… such relief. Such terrible, unthinkable relief. You were a monster, you were sure, for wanting it, but you couldn’t stop living, even this monstrous life. Sometimes, you found, you could remember Ursula in ways that barely hurt at all. This, at least, was a reason to go on, wasn’t it?  
Mechanically, the psychiatrist nods. You say that you’re tired, and ask politely to be taken back to your room. There, you weep, though you don’t know what you’re weeping for. So much, now, is a mystery to you.  
Another: Oswald Cobblepot comes calling. It is he, not Jim, whom you find sitting in the other chair- Jim’s chair- when the guards take you to the room. Raising your eyebrows, you watch the guards leave.  
“To what do I owe the pleasure?” you ask.  
Oswald only says, his face a grotesque parody of sympathy: “I heard that Jim Gordon visited you. Got a little rough.”  
“I’m touched that you feel the need to mention it. How did you know?”  
Oswald snaps, “Do you think anything happens to you that I don’t hear about?”  
“It’s always flattering to be paid attention-- but you didn’t answer: what brings you here,” you smile at your private joke in repeating yourself, “to my little corner of Purgatorio?”  
“You’re helping Jim with his investigation into your crimes.”  
“Oh? And what makes you think that?”  
“He wouldn’t be slapping you around just for fun,” Oswald smiles ghoulishly, “He has standards. If he’s hurting you, it’s because he thinks it’ll get him something he wants.”  
“Unfortunately, I didn’t seem to know anything that interested him.”  
“So, now, you can bore me, too.”  
You sigh. You tell Oswald the same story that you told Jim. It’s a good story. It’s rich with detail. You almost believe it, too.  
“You’re lying,” Oswald says, “There was no masked man.”  
“What, then, is the truth?”  
“Sofia Falcone,” he says, raising his eyebrows so that his eyes widen dangerously, “I know that she’s behind this.”  
“Well, then, kill her, and be done with it.”  
He frowns.  
“I suppose that the truth is of as great importance to you as it is to Jim.”  
“I need to know.”  
“Why?”  
Oswald makes a disgusted face. “Why?”  
“The most valuable thing that I can tell you, Oswald, is that knowing the truth helps nothing. Do what you will, live your life as you will. Understand that once you know the truth, it makes it impossible to live. Your life is no longer your own. It belongs to the truth.”  
“Spare me the amateur philosophizing.”  
“All right. I will tell you one thing that I didn’t tell Jim.” You tell Oswald the name of the person in the GCPD that the masked man told you was working for him.  
Oswald smiles. “I can see why you didn’t tell that to Jim.”  
“Yes,” you say, and frown a little, “I did feel a little bit bad about that. Especially when he was so lavish in his expressions of gratitude.”  
Oswald laughs. The sound of a dog barking once in the dead of night. A strange and knowing sound, piercing the silence with ghastly gravity. Your frown deepens.  
Oswald shakes his head. He stands, looks down at you. You fold your hands in your lap, and look up at him expectantly. “I told you. Nothing happens to you that I don’t hear about.”  
Then, you understand, and you smile gently. “So, this is neither for your benefit nor for mine, but for his.”  
With his small hands in their red gloves, his grip deceptively strong, Oswald forces you to your knees. “If you like.”  
It would be tempting to think about Jim, as some kind of balm against your predicament, but you find that you just don’t want to. Sometimes, wretchedness is so complete that it can only be savored, for what it is. You even find yourself enjoying it, wanting to make Oswald enjoy it. You let him slow down, draw it out. You touch him, your hands smoothing over his soft, cool skin. You touch him, you lick him, you kiss him. Trembling, making small, wounded sounds, he comes in your mouth. When he pulls you up, you kiss him, roughly, but not without sweetness. You caress his cheek. He pushes a gloved hand into your uniform, and pulls you off, hard and fast.  
Low in your throat, you laugh.  
Now, he’s decorous, almost stiff. He gives you a handkerchief. He doesn’t want it back. Something to remember him by, you think, indulging yourself. Perhaps, though, like Jim, he will come back. Better still, perhaps they’ll both come back. How strange everything has become.  
“That was for Jim,” Oswald says, startling you, “This, though, this is for me.”  
You make a sound that could be laughter. The knife is sharp. There is, at least, that. You can’t see, nor can you feel, exactly where it goes. Pain isn’t exact. When it’s this large, it fills not just the body, but the room, the world. Are you crying?  
Perhaps you are, because Oswald is soothing you, as he eases you slowly and carefully onto the floor. It’s like a dance. He has to move nimbly, to compensate for his bad leg; quick, shuffling steps as he lowers you. His hand, in its glove, on your cheek, is cold. The floor is cold. You feel cold, but it’s a cold unlike any you’ve ever known before. It steals into your hands and feet, then your arms and legs, eating you alive; cold that comes from within, as though you, yourself, were the cold, and always had been. Warmth had always been a disguise, one which is now dissolving. Your vision dissolves, too. The periphery crawls with velvet worms. Oswald in the center. A camera’s iris closing. What is his expression? He’s serene. It’s you who are dissolving, yet he is at peace. You continue to watch him, waiting. Waiting for understanding, as all, finally, is revealed to you. Obligingly, he stays where he is, he stays with you as you die. But he reveals nothing.  
Put out the torches. Hide the moon. Hide the stars.


End file.
